Health and Medicine

Training nurses means mastering a new technology

With more hospitals adopting electronic health records, a simulated EHR system lets nurse educators give students hands-on experience

It’s a scene being played out around the US. In a classroom with dozens of computers, nurses are learning the latest in health-care information technology – the electronic health record, or EHR.

But in this case, nurses are not getting trained to use the technology in a hospital or clinic. They’re learning the technology so they can modify their teaching strategies to prepare our future nurses.

As the US health-care system adopts more and more new technologies, particularly EHRs, many nursing schools are finding that their educators need assistance incorporating EHR training into their lesson plans. Hospitals are using EHRs in increasing numbers — counting on them for everything from basic charting to population health management — so nursing schools are eager to get their nurse educators trained on a technology that educators may not have experienced when they themselves were in nursing school.

“The average age of a nurse educator is 56,” said Fran Phillips, Marketing Manager of Customer Marketing for Elsevier’s Nursing & Health Professions (NHP) group, based in St. Louis. “When they were in nursing school, they didn’t have EHRs; now, their students must know that technology, and that’s created an education gap.”

As of December, more than 300 nursing programs have adopted SimChart, a simulated EHR system that gives students practice with electronic documentation. There are more than 20,000 users and an average of 6,700 daily sessions of students using SimChart.

The adoption of EHRs is being driven in part by the US government’s incentives for health-care providers that can demonstrate they are putting these systems to “meaningful use.”

Recognizing the coming trend for EHR education several years ago, Elsevier acquired an EHR education company called Nurse², or Nurse Squared, in 2010. After converting the software into an online tool and renaming it SimChart, Elsevier began selling it to nursing schools around the nation. At that point, many nursing schools started asking for help training their educators on how to use the product.

“Before the educators could teach their nursing students, they needed to know how education-based EHRs worked,” Phillips said.

In early 2012, Elsevier’s NHP Customer Marketing team ramped up these training sessions, offering them as a benefit to the nursing schools that purchased SimChart. Phillips and a group of nurse educators with experience integrating SimChart into their curriculum began giving training  sessions across the country, sometimes for as many as 40 nurse educators in a session. Elsevier conducted 18 multi-school sessions in St. Louis alone. In all, Elsevier conducted 234 training sessions, including on-site sessions and webinars.

The sessions are popular for several reasons, Phillips said. Participants are able to learn the system basics and discuss in an open forum how to approach teaching their students. Also, in the sessions with multiple schools, participants can find out how their peers at other institutions plan to implement and use SimChart.

At a recent train-the-trainer session in a computer lab at Middlesex Community College in Middlefield, Connecticut, Phillips joined Dr. June Thompson, SimChart Product Director at  Elsevier, and Jillian Zumwalt, Education Solutions Consultant, and 12 nurse educators from six different colleges throughout the state.

“Being able to take part in some hands-on training … has given us all a head start on the needed skills to implement SimChart in our work with students in our clinical nursing courses,” said Linda M. Perfetto, MS, APRN, BC, CNE, CNOR, Director of System Nursing Curricular Operations for Connecticut Community Colleges, who convened the group.

Thompson ran the class with Phillips and Zumwalt supporting. As Thompson ran through how to enter basic patient vital signs into SimChart, they watched the “students” closely to make sure they were all following along at the same pace. The online SimChart program allows nurse educators to train, track and test their students.

“These folks catch on quickly,” Thompson said. “They’re not used to the technology, but once they get their feet wet, it gets much easier and faster for them.”

SimChart is modeled after actual EHR software used in hospitals and medical offices. It translates course content into the practical, everyday tasks students will encounter in the workplace and allows students to practice documenting, monitoring and analyzing patient care in an interactive learning environment.

Using SimChart, educators can build a consistent, integrated learning experience with three key components:

• “Case Studies,” which challenge students to document care and make clinical judgments from one phase to another

• Simulation, which helps students build and edit patient records and even integrate those records into simulations and skills lab activities

• “My Clinicals,” which enable nursing students to document the care of patients they see during their clinical rotations.

“After completing SimChart training, nurse educators (have) all of the tools and resources to implement it into their curricula and educate students with confidence,” Zumwalt said.

Elsevier’s Fran Phillips, June Thompson and Jillian Zumwalt contributed to this story.